Cookery Courses: Pasta making

Rarely a week goes by when I don't have one
pasta dish or another for supper, whether that's a quick bowl
whipped up at home with a dollop of pesto, or something more
special in a restaurant, served with lashings of shaved truffles.
But I've never actually made my own pasta from scratch, so I
decided I should learn to.

Handily, L'atelier des Chefs, situated right in central
London and just a stone's throw from Oxford Circus (with another
location in St Paul's), runs one- and two-hour classes to teach
pupils the art of pasta making. During the one-hour class, you'll
learn how to make and roll your pasta dough, along with an
accompanying puttanesca sauce. The two-hour session, which I signed
up for, equips you with the skills to make two dishes.

The classes are taught in small groups, and are very hands-on.
You won't spend much time standing around drinking tea while the
chef does everything. If there's garlic to be chopped, you'll be
the one chopping it!

First, we made the dough, a process very much like kneading
bread, and pleasingly simple. While that was resting, we made the
fillings and sauces: goats' cheese and walnut with a salsa verde
and sweet potato and prawn with a chilli oil (the verdict when I
took the results home was that the goats' cheese wins on flavour).
An unexpected perk was a lesson in knife skills - mine are nothing
to shout about, but I think they've improved under the chef's
expert guidance.

Then we were taught to use a pasta machine to roll the dough,
before filling it and shaping it into ravioli and tortellini - a
surprisingly therapeutic, repetitive
process.

I opted to take the fruits of my labours home, but you can stay
and enjoy your meal at the cookery school with a glass of wine - a
nice chance to get to know to your fellow students, which you
probably won't have time to do during the busy class. There's also
a well-stocked cook shop, should you feel impulsively the need to
buy a pasta maker or lemon juicer. And there's no need to take
notes, because the recipes are handily emailed to you the next
day.

I really enjoyed this class, and though I learnt a lot of new
skills, I feel I could replicate the dishes at home without the
expert guidance of a chef, which is surely the aim of a cookery
class. One of the real selling points of this cookery school is its
location, and the short duration of many of its classes. If you're
based in London, you can just pop in on your lunch hour, learn to
make a new dish, and then eat it with your classmates before
heading back to work. Now that's time management.